Bread, pies, and La Plante

I loathe shopping. Just in case there is a single reader out there who was not aware of this fact, I thought I would remind you.

And, because it is colder, we are getting through far too much bread. Now, another reminder. The freezer broke down ages ago so we can’t freeze bread, which means I go every day or every other day or to the hated supermarket.

Why, you ask, am I not making my own bread? Indeed dear reader, I asked myself that very same question.

Many years ago Partner would make the bread while I trotted out to work. He fitted bread-making in on his quiet days and made a few loaves, freezing a couple.

But as I don’t like to be outdone, some years later when we bought a Rayburn for our last UK house, I decided this was a fine opportunity to learn to make bread. I took a week off work, and decided to make a loaf a day until I had got this bread-making thing cracked. And no, I didn’t want to go out and buy a bread-making machine.

My lovely Rayburn (and my scales, and my Belfast sink, and my granite worktops, and my Lefroy Brooks taps ….

And in a week, I had indeed got it cracked. I used the Kenwood Chef dough hook to knead the bread, but later, I was too lazy to wash it up, so just kneaded by hand.

I looked in the fridge. I’ve got dried yeast here in Gib although used to use fresh in the UK and Spain (from Mercadona). But the flour stakes were low (I keep it in the fridge as we get food moths in Gib and Spain – they like flour and all farinaceous goodies).

As there didn’t seem to be much point traipsing to Morrisons to buy flour when the whole point of the exercise was to avoid going to Morrisons, I wandered down the High Street to check out a couple of health food shops. Holland and Barrett had all manner of gluten-free flours, tapioca, rice, soya, potato, you name it – but no wheat. Off I went to a private health food shop to see what they had.

‘Do you have flour?’ I asked in a resigned tone of voice. Like, why would a health food shop sell bog standard flour? ‘Oh yes,’ she replied excitedly – and pointed out a huge range of flours, most of which were gluten-free. I think it is admirable that shops are catering for people who need a gluten-free diet, but I don’t need one and I like using wheat for my bread. Anyway, I toyed between rye and spelt and settled for rye.

Rye makes a heavier loaf but at least it tastes ok. And it did. The only problem was that I over-proved it so when it went into the oven it expanded horizontally instead of vertically. So I ended up with flat bread.

Nothing daunted, I decided to embark on a different loaf yesterday. By now I had been to Morrisons and got some exceedingly ordinary strong white flour.

‘Carrot bread?’ I suggested to Partner – the previous one had been flavoured with onion.

‘If you make carrot bread, you’ll eat it,’ he snapped. i think he’s confusing it with carrot cake. Anyway I made Pane con Pomodori e Cipolle Rosse. Except I didn’t have red onions so I used white.

Tomato and onion bread

I’ll add the recipe to the recipe page on the header, but suffice to say it is quite delicious. It worked out a bit expensive, as I used organic tomatoes and it wanted 1lb of toms. But even so, it still doesn’t cost as much as an expensive loaf from Morries. The flour cost 99p for three pounds, so that’s 33p per loaf, plus a drop of water, some dried yeast, and the toms, onions and chillies (from the garden). And the loaf is huge.

In case anyone thinks I spend all my time cooking and baking – I don’t. Clearly I spend half my time on here.

And in fact, just to prove that I too, succumb to buying prepared food, here is a delicious pie. For once not made by me. This is flaky pastry and individual pies, whereas I make shortcrust pie in a big pie dish.

Pie!

This is billed as steak-style and onion pie. It’s Quorn, about which I am ambivalent but they are yummy. Sadly someone else in Gib has discovered that they are yummy. Morries has been depleted of them for days. Partner went to Morries and gazed mournfully at the space in the freezer where the pies should be. Next to him was a woman looking equally sad. ‘No pies,’ he said. ‘No,’ she gloomily agreed, and off they both went without buying anything else from the freezer section. (I made a pie that day).

En route to ghastly Morries I took a closer look at the expensive floating hotel. It looked worse in daylight. I’ve never fancied a holiday on a cruise ship, Partner and I rudely and snobbishly refer to them as floating council estates when they turn up in Gib and disgorge all their oiky passengers. I can’t think of anything worse than being cooped up with a load of people who I almost certainly wouldn’t like for a week or two or more.

Floating council estate

What are they doing up there? They’ll need to do a lot to make this look a pretty ship.

And en route back one evening, I took a few photos of the lights down Main Street. It really is lovely in the evening, it is so quiet and peaceful.

Main Street

The Governor’s Gaff

Looking south, down our quiet end of Main Street

Lynda La Plante – crime novels

Let’s have some more books. As part of my haul of 70 free books, a couple were included by Lynda La Plante. LLP is a British crime write, who became famous with her TV series of Prime Suspect, featuring the wonderful Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison. A tough woman in a touch man’s world. Wiki link.

The two books in my goody bag were Anna Travis ones (some of these have also been televised).

She is younger than Tennison, mid to late 20s, bright, Oxbridge-educated and fast-tracking for promotion and career. Her father was a DCI (now dead), and in his working life he helped the then younger James Langton. While the books that I have read are about Travis and her career, it’s Langton who leaps out of the pages. Clever, smart, arrogant, selfish and mesmerising. Unlike Anna with her degree, Langton has worked his way up.

My free books were Red Dahlia and Clean Cut, the second and third in the series. I do wish people would buy the whole set, or at least buy the first one. It’s as bad as being left without the last Twilight novel.

An OK read on the left, a good one on the right. (But best to read in sequence)

Red Dahlia is a very nasty plot with some vile graphic detail. Why anyone wants to read about someone’s nipples being sliced off and shoved up her anus is beyond me. It’s based on a true American unsolved murder called The Black Dahlia. If you want to feel sick, check it on wiki.

But leaving aside – if that’s possible – the issue of abusing, torturing, raping, and killing women, oh and add in incest too, the book is a good read. Just skip the graphic bits.

Clean Cut is something else again. More complex and much darker although not quite as much mutilation. The Travis/Langton characters have moved on and are living together. The plot involves a few murder cases that turn out to be connected in an odd sort of way. This did leave me confused (easily done).

At the beginning of the book Langton gets attacked with a machete and nearly dies. Our heroine nurses him back to good health although he is a veritable pain in the arse, and once he is better the miserable git chucks her. And then all the separate cases start coming together. I had to backtrack with this just to get all the cases and characters straight. A bit like Potter which I also found confusing, but far better than Potter. As well as the odd few murders, add in illegal immigrants, voodoo, prostitution, chopping people and kids up and feeding them to pigs, and stir well.

Langton is determined to find the person who nearly killed him. This is what makes the book good. He is so single-minded, resolute and tough. And he keeps it all to himself. I won’t spoil it by giving away the ending but I thought it was great.

Partner was instructed to read both novels and did not like the Langton character at all. Some time ago, another blogger wrote something about sexuality in novels. LLP has created a very sexual character in Langton. The sort of man you know you should ignore and can’t resist.

Some, but not all of these books have been televised as the ‘Above Suspicion’ series (the name of the first book). I popped me over to YouTube to see what I could find. No Clean Cut sadly, I suspect it was too complex to put into 90 minutes or whatever.

LLP wrote the screenplays but I thought they were a poor reflection of the books. And what about the lead actors in the series? Kelly Reilly and Ciarán Hinds.

We have a woman in her mid to late 30s playing a woman ten years younger. To be fair she looked young, and acted extremely datelessly. In fact she could have been in high school the way she sat interviewing people with her notebook on her knee and squeaking with a prissy little voice. And I don’t know how the hell she got into Oxford, because anyone going to a murder site in the country wearing a short skirt and high heels is seriously lacking in brain cells. Even your average reporter isn’t that stupid and our photographers carried Wellingtons in the boots of their cars. So the touchy feisty independent Travis of the books turns into a bimbo on screen.

Hinds at 60+ is more than ten years older than Langton in the books, or maybe 20? And fatter. In the books he is always portrayed as long, lean, rangy etc. But his performance was better than Reilly as Travis. At least he had the bossy attitude. But there was no sex!! The books major on the relationship between the two of them. And it wasn’t there in the TV productions. Just one chaste kiss from her to him and he looked surprised. When he finally gets back to Anna’s home in Clean Cut after lots of treatment, and she’s helped him into bed because he’s struggling to walk – his first comment is ‘I suppose a fuck’s out of the question?’ Sex is part of life and when it’s part of a story, it should be included, however it’s portrayed.

The best YT vid I watched was, of course one of the books I hadn’t read, so I had nothing to compare it with.

I hunted down a couple of other books from the library, Silent Scream (also on YT) and Blind Fury. Silent Scream is about an actress who gets murdered, and was OK but nothing special. In Blind Fury Travis finds herself a new man and they decide to get married. Natch, it doesn’t happen. But this didn’t hang together for me. Her new man is nice enough but there wasn’t the same intensity that had characterised the Travis/Langton relationship. It was more like ‘Here’s a nice bloke, might as well marry him, (because I can’t have the one I really want)’.

But recommended reads? Yes. I’ve read them more than once. Do try and start with the early ones first because that will give a better feel for the series as there are back references to previous books, although they do stand alone.

Scores:

Red Dahlia 2/3 out of 5 but that is really because of the nasty graphic detail.

Clean Cut 4/4.5, the complexity dragged it down from a 5 but it is a good read.

Silent Scream and Blind Fury, both a 3. Clean Cut was so powerful that anything coming after that was going to find it hard to match.

I see there are another three written after Blind Fury, so La Plante is on a roll with this series. Just wish someone would leave their unwanted versions around for me to read.